In this series, I will be engaging in an extended comparison of the role of the Soul in Plotinus’ Enneads with that of Vimarśa in Pratyabhijñā philosophy. This comparative study will analyze the similar roles played by both concepts within their respective metaphysical systems, for the sake of contextualizing recent scholarly interest (including my own doctoral research) in similarities between Neoplatonic and Kashmiri Śaiva theories of aesthetics. Taking Kashmiri Śaivism or ‘Paramādvaita’ as a suitable comparison to Platonic thought follows what is increasingly becoming an established path of Greco-Indian comparative research. Before beginning this series, then, because such a history bears on the method for studying Soul and Vimarśa, it is worth recounting this paramparā.
In The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, Raniero Gnoli emphasizes the centrality of the concept of camatkāra to Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic theory. He traced this term back to Utpaladeva (ĪPK I.5.11 and the accompanying vṛtti comments) as pioneering its technical use (which he understands as ‘wonder’ and ‘astonishment’). Furthermore, he drew a parallel between Abhinavagupta, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Plato’s Phaderus and Proclus’s Platonic Theology, the latter of which he quotes in Greek, with his own translation:
“The aesthetic and mystical state of consciousness are not only characterized by a particular bliss or repose. According to Abhinavagupta and his school, they are accompanied by a sense of wonder or surprise. The word expressing this wonder, i.e. camatkāra is frequently found, in its ordinary, non-technical sense of surprise, amazement, in Indian literature. […] The first to use this term in a technical sense was probably Utpaladeva, who was the master of the master of Abhinavaguta. […] The general idea underlying these words (compare, in this connection, also the Pāli and buddhist term samvega) is that both the mystical and the aesthetic experience imply a cessation of a world – the ordinary, historical world, the samsāra – and its sudden replacement by a new dimension of reality. In this sense the two are wonder or surprise. A parallel of this idea of a kind of wonder which fills the soul in front of the beautiful or the sacred, exists in western thought also. We find it in Plato and especially in Neoplatonismus. “Souls,” Plato says, “when they see here any likeness of things of that other world, are stricken with wonder, ἐκπλήττονται and can no longer control themselves” (Phaidros 250a). According to Proclus, this sense of amazement, ἔκπληξις, accompanies both the beautiful and the sacred. “The beautiful,” he says in the Theologia Platonica, is appearing with wonder μετ’ ἐκπληξεως φαινόμενον, and incites “all the things towards itself through desire and wonder.” In the same work we read eventually that “we are incited toward the beautiful with wonder and emotion” and that “the soul, seeing the invisible, as it were, rejoices itself, admires its appearing, and is astonished at it. And as the mystics in the most saint religious rites, before the mystical visions, are stricken with wonder, so, among the intelligibles also, the beautiful appears in advance, before the communion with the good, and strikes with wonder those who are seeing.” (Gnoli 1968, xlv-xlvii).
This connection notably informs my choice to compare the Plotinian concept of Soul to the concept of Vimarśa for Utpaladeva, because the very passage to which Gnoli is referring grounds camatkāra in Vimarśa: we will return to this in a later post.
Gnoli’s student, Raffaele Torella, has reinterpreted camatkāra not as wonder, but as “savoring” (Torella 2023b, 63), having contextualized the term through Abhinavagupta’s commentary on Utpaladeva’s work (Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī) as well as his aesthetic commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra (Abhinavabhāratī). Despite this helpful revision, Torella has maintained the comparative path set forth by Gnoli, drawing parallels between Abhinavagupta’s understanding of aesthetic experience with that of Plotinus (Torella 2023a, 761). Both this comparison as well as Torella’s rereading of camatkāra not as instantaneous wonder has had an impact in scholarly research on spiritual practices in Plotinus. Michael Wakoff’s 2023 paper presented at the Society for Classical Studies conference, “Plotinus as a Rasika”, draws directly on Torella’s understanding, even including some direct contributions by Torella himself. Wakoff has since reworked this paper into a chapter (“Savoring Beauty: A Plotinian Spiritual Practice”) in a forthcoming volume edited by Sarah Abhel-Rappe and Mateusz Stróżyński. Certainly, we must also mention Gregory Shaw’s 2017 article “Platonic Tantra,” which later grew into a full-length book, Hellenic Tantra – while not primarily concerned with aesthetics, it nevertheless shows the growth of Platonic and Tantric comparative research.
But among all scholarly comparisons between Kashmiri Śaivism and later Platonism, Michal Just’s 2013 article in Comparative Philosophy titled “Neoplatonism and Paramādvaita,” is perhaps most responsible for firmly establishing the latter — rather than classical Advaita — as a fitting partner to late Platonism for intercultural philosophical inquiry. Just addresses two primary challenges which faced earlier scholarly attempts at comparing Plotinian thought with Indian philosophy:
(1) The enthusiasm of scholars of previous generations for a historical-diffusionist model which tries to locate either a Greek origin for philosophy in India (Eliade), or Indian origin for Plotinian philosophy (McEvilley), despite a significant lack of evidence to support such a model. Armstrong in many ways already settled this question in his work, “Plotinus and India.”
(2) The fact that specific details of Advaitan philosophical teachings do not seem to have a strong Plotinian analogue. While Plotinus clearly does not think that matter exists in the way Real Beings (ie, the Forms) do, he does not appear to argue for an illusionist explanation for the sensible cosmos. Much of the scholarly debates observed in the two volumes, Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy and Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, return to this topic.
Just is able to strongly address both of these problems. The first he resolves by abstaining from the question of historical influence (without going down the alternative road, with Bussanich 2005 towards a perennialist explanation for philosophical similarities). He instead proposes a “structural hypothesis,” where he aims to explain philosophical similarities between Platonic and Tantric authors through ‘structural reason:’ analyzing how concepts which appear similar have analogous functions, serve analogous purposes, and answer similar questions between the two systems. The second, he aptly overcomes — with an advantage over those earlier comparative volumes by having access to recent advances in scholarship on Tantra — in pointing to a non-dualist, ‘dynamic monist’ philosophical analogue which does not affirm the world to be an illusion: Kashmiri Śaivism.
This series will take up not only Just’s proposal, which is now clearly recognized as productive, but also his structural hypothesis (unlike, for example, Shaw 2017, 281). This will allow us to Soul and Vimarśa without the extratextual baggage of speculation about both possible channels of philosophical transmission between Greece and India and shared mystical experiences to which we, textually, do not have an unmediated access. Rather, we will study how Soul and Vimarśa each fit into a broader system of thought, and how their similarities emerge rationally as philosophers find themselves with only so many possible ways to resolve problems.
This series will provide a comparison a fourfold structural analysis of Soul and Vimarśa: both (1) proceed from and revert to a metaphysically prior principle of consciousness identified with a masculine deity; (2) are fundamentally immaterial; (3) are a necessary principle of motion, change and action; and (4) operate at multiple registers, universal and individual, where the former maintains a perfect, inerrant state while the latter may admit of error.
A brief word about terminology: the term Vimarśa comes from the root √mṛś, meaning “consider, examine, or think”, to which is added the prefix vi-, which strengthens or intensifies the root. Torella translates the term in English as “reflective awareness” and notes that across Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (which will serve as the primary Sanskrit text in comparison) and the Pratyabhijñā school more generally the root √mṛś appears with other prefixes which are largely used interchangeably with Vimarśa (Torella 2021, xxv, footnote 32).
References
Bussanich, John. (2005). “The Roots of Platonism and Vedānta: Comments on McEvilley.” International Journal of Hindu Studies (9), Springer. pp. 1-20.
Gnoli, Raniero (1968). The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies LXII. (Varanasi: The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office). Second Edition.
Just, Michal. (2013) “Neoplatonism and Paramādvaita”, Comparative Philosophy 4.2. 1-28.
Shaw, Gregory. (2017), “Platonic Tantra: Theurgists of Late Antiquity”. Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei (X). Boccassini, Daniela (Ed.).
Torella, Raffaele (2021) (tr.), The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva with the Author’s Vṛtti: Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass).
Torella, Raffaele. (2023), “Beauty (Saundarya)” in Eltschinger, Vincent (Ed.), Burlesque of the Philosophers. Indian and Buddhist Studies in Memory of Helmut Krasser. Hamburg Buddhist Studies Series 19. (Bochum/Freiburg: projekt verlag).
Torella, Raffaele. (2023), “Camatkāra.” Journal of Indological Studies (34-35), March. pp. 39-72.